The Destructive Cult of Celebrity

We all have gods, it is just a question of which ones. And in American society, our gods are often celebrities.

In celebrity culture, the object is to get as close to the celebrity as possible. Those who can touch or own a relic of the celebrity hope for a transference of celebrity power.

Real life, our own life, is viewed next to the lives of celebrities as inadequate and inauthentic. Celebrities are portrayed as idealized forms of ourselves. It is we who are never fully actualized in a celebrity culture.

Soldiers and Marines speak of entering combat as if they are entering a movie, although if they try to engage in movie-style heroics they often are killed. The difference between the celebrity-inspired heroics and the reality of war, which takes less than a minute in a firefight to grasp, is jolting. Wounded Marines booed and hissed John Wayne when he visited them in a hospital in World War II. They had uncovered the manipulation and self-delusion of celebrity culture. They understood that mass culture is a form of social control, a way to influence behavior that is self-destructive.

Celebrity culture is a hostile takeover of religion by celebrity culture. Commodities and celebrity culture alone define what it means to belong to American society, how we recognize our place in society and how we determine our spiritual life.

Our choice of brands becomes our pathetic expression of individuality. Advertisers use celebrities to promise us that through the purchase of a product we can attain celebrity power.

Celebrity culture plunges us into a moral void. The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest and fame. These values are hollow hallucinations that leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life of self-absorption. They tell us that existence is to be centered on the practices and desires of the self rather than the common good.

Celebrity culture encourages us to turn our love inward, to think of ourselves as potential celebrities who possess unique if unacknowledged gifts. It is the culture of narcissism. The banal chatter of anyone, no matter how insipid, has in celebrity culture cosmic significance. Reality, however, exposes something very different. And the juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our insignificant individual achievements leads to frustration, anger, insecurity and a fear of invalidation. It leads to an accelerated flight toward the celebrity culture, what Chris Rojek in his book “Celebrity” calls “the cult of distraction that valorizes the superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity culture.”

This cult of distraction masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, and costly imperial wars as well as economic and political corruption.

The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.

Paraphrased from the column Truthdig column "What Price Hollywood" by Chris Hedges.